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b'Thanks to Carson, Mia, Eli, and Pranav for their suggestions this week!
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\\nFurther reading:
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\\nRNA for the first time recovered from an extinct species
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\\nStudy finds ongoing evolution in Tasmanian Devils\' response to transmissible cancer
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\\nTasmanian devil research offers new insights for tackling cancer in humans
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\\nThe Tasmanian devil looks really cute but fights all the time [picture by JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]:
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\\nThe Thylacine could opens its jaws verrrrrrry wide:
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\\nShow transcript:
\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.
\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to cover two animals that a lot of people have suggested. Carson and Mia both want to learn about the Tasmanian tiger, and Eli and Pranav both want to hear about the Tasmanian devil. We talked about the Tasmanian tiger, AKA the thylacine, in episode 1, and I thought we\\u2019d had a Tasmanian devil episode too but it turns out I was thinking of a March 2019 Patreon bonus episode. So it\\u2019s definitely time to learn about both!
\\nThe thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to New Guinea, mainland Australia, and the Australian island of Tasmania, and the last known individual died in captivity in 1936. But thylacine sightings have continued ever since it was declared extinct. It was a shy, nervous animal that didn\\u2019t do well in captivity, so if the animal survives in remote areas of Tasmania, it\\u2019s obviously keeping a low profile.
\\nThe thylacine was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail. It was the size of a big dog, some two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It had a doglike head with rounded ears and could open its long jaws extremely wide. Some accounts say that it would sometimes hop instead of run when it needed to move faster, but this seems to be a myth. It was also a quiet animal, rarely making noise except while hunting, when it would give frequent double yips.
\\nA 2017 study discovered that the thylacine population split into two around 25,000 years ago, with the two groups living in eastern and western Australia. Around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct\\u2014but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them.
\\nBecause the thylacine went extinct so recently and scientists have access to preserved specimens less than a hundred years old, and since the thylacine\\u2019s former habitat is still in place, it\\u2019s a good candidate for de-extinction. As a result, it\\u2019s been the subject of many genetic studies recently, to learn as much about it as possible. It\\u2019ll probably be quite a while before we have the technology to successfully clone a thylacine, but in the meantime people in Australia keep claiming to see thylacines in the wild. Maybe they really aren\\u2019t extinct.
\\nThe Tasmanian devil is related to the thylacine. It\\u2019s about the size of a small to average dog, maybe a bulldog, which it resembles in some ways. It\\u2019s compact and muscular with a broad head, relatively short snout, and a big mouth with prominent lower fangs. It\\u2019s not related to canids at all, of course, and if you just glanced at a Tasmanian devil,'